Once upon a time, way back in 1992, a little cartoon show about a dog and a cat called Ren & Stimpy was making waves with episodes about rubber nipples, a toast headed superhero, and all sorts of gross out gags parents felt were too extreme for kids.

But Ren & Stimpy wasn’t really a kiddie show, John Kricfalusi’s seminal animated freakout simply fell victim to the cartoon stigma built by Disney decades earlier, which established the idea that all TV cartoon shows should be made for kids.

Proof that Ren & Stimpy was not made for kids lies in the episode where Frank Zappa voiced the Pope, who is rescued by Powdered Toast Man and has to cling on to Toast Man's speedo clad buns as they fly through the air.

Also of note (at least to me) is the voice of Powdered Toast Man was done by Gary Owens, the original voice of Space Ghost in the 1960s (as well as a bunch of other Hanna-Barbera heroic characters), the hand-over-the-ear announcer on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, the voice-over pitchman for a million commercials AND host of an afternoon radio show in L.A. for over 20 years (which, for a few of those years, I wrote for... he even gave my joke-writing skills a tongue-in-cheek endorsement in a radio trade paper, calling me "funnier than Jack Lord and Lorne Greene combined"). So, please, NEVER mention Ren & Stimpy without "and Gary Owens as Powdered Toast Man".

I remember that episode. God, those first two seasons were so great. They were totally off-the-wall. The 3rd season they forced John K. out, and it resorted to gross-out humor, and totally lost the cool weirdness. Oddly, John K. tried to do sort of a revival, something like "The Lost Episodes", with new artists. It was even worse! He talked about how they just did whatever weird thing they thought of in the original, but then just resorted to stupid fart and sex jokes. It's like he completely forgot about the original ideas.